This year has been unkind to Jalisco in the sphere of murders. With 171 dead, March was declared the state’s single bloodiest month since 1997.
However, statistical analysis has come to a counter-intuitive conclusion: while homicides have skyrocketed in the last four years, the number of detentions relating to that crime has dipped considerably in the same period.
As reported by the state Attorney General’s statistics wing, between 2013-2017 murders increased by 24.5 percent, while apprehensions of alleged murderers has fallen by a whopping 64.8 percent.
This decrease is being blamed in many quarters on the Sistema Acusatorio Adversarial, passed in 2016, which sought to emphasize investigation and scientific evidence over confessions. Critics say that the new penal code has resulted in an alarming drop in imprisonments because police at various jurisdictional levels lack the training necessary to make it effective.